Fifty Mice

by Daniel Pyne

  ALSO BY DANIEL PYNE

  A Hole in the Ground Owned by a Liar

  Twentynine Palms

  Published by the Penguin Group

  Penguin Group (USA) LLC

  375 Hudson Street

  New York, New York 10014

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  Copyright © 2014 by Daniel Pyne

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  ISBN 978-0-698-16870-1

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  Version_1

  To those who brought me along

  CONTENTS

  ALSO BY DANIEL PYNE

  TITLE PAGE

  COPYRIGHT

  DEDICATION

  EPIGRAPH

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  We are able to find everything in our memory, which is like a dispensary or chemical laboratory in which chance steers our hand sometimes to a soothing drug and sometimes to a dangerous poison.

  —MARCEL PROUST

  Where you come from is gone, where you thought you were going to never was there, and where you are is no good unless you can get away from it.

  —FLANNERY O’CONNOR

  | 1 |

  THIS IS WHAT HE REMEMBERS:

  The cool ripple of stale oily electric onrushing air.

  The thrum of the tracks.

  The wan headlight slurring over the tunnel tiles.

  The flickering windows of the Red Line train, a filmstrip of fleeting images, like thoughts crossing consciousness, the expectant faces of arriving passengers overlaid with the spectral reflection of travelers anxiously waiting to get started, and none of it sticking, none of it mattering. The raw unspooling of life, unexamined.

  And everything about to change.

  Slurring, slowing, slowing, brakes sighing. The slack clatter of the cars coming to rest at the Hollywood/Western Metro platform.

  He remembers waiting, listening to Wilco on earbuds, his tie loose, his gym bag at his feet. A text message hums in from Stacy: l <3 u. And a slightly creepy emoticon he has trouble interpreting. Is it smiling, or crying? He chooses not to reply.

  The Metro Rail warning tone sounds, doors hiss and split; Jay sidesteps departing passengers, bikes, backpacks, and a gelatinous man on a Hoveround, and queues with the boarding riders, making room for a tiny old woman with too many plastic grocery bags, one of which gets snarled on the handlebars of a messenger’s bike as it wheels past her. The bag rips. Canned vegetables and Jell-O boxes and mangos spill out across the floor of the car and onto the platform.

  The old woman sighs. “Oh Lordy. Crap. Crap.”

  Jay stoops to help her collect her scatter before the train takes off. Fruit, dry goods, a bottle of Metamucil. He’s half in and half out of the car, stretching for a can of low-sodium soup, when the warning tone bleats, A-sharp, but the doors can’t close because Jay’s in the way.

  “Clear the doors,” bargles the driver over the intercom.

  “All my tapioca.”

  “Hold the doors,” Jay yells. “Will somebody hold the doors?”

  Rider eyes are on him, but, of course, nobody moves. The voice of the driver rumbles again gruff, inarticulate, some other kind of warning, the A-sharp bleats again. But now another rider, a woman, is helping them, and they’re going to be all right, her dark hair brushing across Jay’s face, something hard and angular under her coat thumping his hip; she collects the last of the loose groceries and hops onto the train. The doors start to close on the befuddled old lady, still just reacting to her bag breaking, and Jay has to pull her inside.

  “You okay?”

  The old lady just goggles at him, world rushing past her. Jay, somehow, has all her bags. He looks for the woman rider who helped him, but can’t find her in the car; he settles the old lady into the handicapped courtesy seat, putting the bags in her lap and her hands through her bag handles, securely, Mr. Chivalry, before he steps back, and realizes—

  “Oh, man.”

  His gym bag.

  Jay has left it on the platform during the crazy rush to collect groceries.

  Shit. “Dammit.” Jay stares out the window back into the tunnel darkness as if he can still see his bag back there. Get off, go back. “Dammit.”

  Someone asks him if he’s okay.

  He turns, suddenly self-conscious, to a brunette standing next to him, and starts to explain: “My bag . . .”—he gestures, pointlessly, with his shoulders, fists shoved in his pockets, resigned— “. . . my keys and everything,” he says.

  She offers no reaction.

  The brunette’s got earbuds too, and thump-happy rap music leaks from them loudly enough for Jay to understand she can’t even hear him. He smiles. Her eyes cut through him, not at him: he’s not even there. He sidesteps, giving her more room, reaching for the overhead handrail to steady himself as the train picks up speed.

  Looks away. Closes a shoulder. No play here.

  When he glances back at her, though, indifferently, with a dull-dawning sense of recognition, wondering if she’s the one who helped him—she’s grinning right at him.

  Weird.

  Jay’s eyes drop to his shoes, then drift up, casually assessing the whole package: pointy black pumps promising long legs and narrow hips, pale hands hooked in her jeans pockets, no rings or jewelry, chewed-down nails, the swerve of her waist, the slight sideways swell of her breasts . . . and the glimmer of a handgun tucked under the lapel of her soot-black blazer.

  What?

  She’s still staring at him.

  So Jay looks nervously away again, to his own slightly puzzled reflection in the subway car window. This is exactly what he was trying to explain to Stacy, earlier: the inescapability, for Jay, of the promi
sing, the new, the next.

  Packing heat.

  Said brunette is behind him, swaying with the movement of the car, her eyes finding his in reflection, now. And holding his gaze. Still grinning.

  She’s older than he thought. Thirty-five, forty?

  But she’s not flirting with him, it’s something else.

  And the train is slowing. And his gym bag is waiting, back at Hollywood and Western.

  Sudden leak of fluorescent light from the Vermont/Sunset platform, rush-hour riders outside crowd toward the arriving train. A-flat warning signal, and the doors gape. Jay is jostled by an impatient passenger, starts his move to the door, but gets shoved hard—in truth spun around so he’s backpedaling—by unseen hands, and the brunette with the legs and the gun and the tailored black suit is right in front of him, smiling, and then somehow Jay’s out of the car, onto the platform, off-balance, spinning like a capstan, caught in a casual crush of commuters coming and going as the two (or are there three?) men with their hands on him steer him out of the crowd.

  He says something, he’s not sure what it is, a kind of half-angry, half-panicked protest, and the brunette says, “Shhhhh.”

  Jay’s jacket is yanked up over his head.

  “Hey. HEY!” Now he’s shouting. He lashes out, but his arms are pinned back.

  He thinks: This isn’t happening. He thinks: Am I being mugged? Nobody hits him, they just hold him. What do they want? His heart skips and he’s sure that he’s calling out for help, but he can’t hear his own voice from the thump of his pulse in his ears, so maybe not, and the coat tightens over his head and his arms are rendered useless by the handlers, their grip unshakable, his feet stumbling under him, and his breath coming too quickly, which doesn’t help.

  He’s dizzy.

  His stomach in his throat.

  This can’t be happening.

  What Jay sees: darkness, splinters of light, then weirdly the thousands of empty film canisters tiling the vaulted subway station ceiling as he dances beneath them, the painted pillars, the scuffed concrete platform, and scattered fragments of faces, hands, shoes, pointy black pumps.

  A small syringe.

  This can’t be happening.

  A needle bites into his shoulder, and his arm floods warm.

  A new fear grips him. He floats up, hollowed, out-of-body: on the Vermont/Sunset Metro station platform during rush hour on an otherwise unremarkable Tuesday, mid-autumn, there is a moment of thrashing confusion as worried commuters dart out of the way of three unremarkable men and one unremarkable but pleasant-looking, dark-haired woman, wrestling with a fourth man who appears to have his coat upside down and tangled around his head. The man cries out, muffled, “WHAT the—wait—you—” but several people will swear, when they go home and tell their husbands or brothers or children about it, that it was just he was having some kind of seizure, and luckily there were people trying to help him who knew what to do and—

  Jay’s knees buckle and blue darkness blooms inside his head and his thoughts tangle. He hears the train depart, senses the emptying of the platform from the echo of footsteps and bodies moving. If only he could run. He makes one last violent effort to get free and then the three men take his full weight as his body sags into them, and the coat comes halfway open and the pretty brunette is flashing at what remains of the worried or just curious commuters entering and leaving the platform something bronze and badgelike from the leather folding wallet that she holds high in her hand and she says something pleasant Jay can’t hear—

  and then—

  | 2 |

  SKIP BACK.

  Two days. Sunday night, or early Monday.

  His eyes blinking open to a bedroom he knew and yet sensed with dull dread was not the bedroom he fell asleep in, because something had been added.

  This is what he remembers:

  Fear.

  Darkness.

  Baroque patterns dusting the walls, thrown upward by streetlights through the beveled diamond windowpanes. The heavy night air and an uneasy stillness. Stacy shifting under the covers beside him, dreaming, fitful. Her pink bare body threw off a dozy heat.

  Slender hand, upturned.

  The engagement ring with its cold hard little diamond.

  Heart beating, mouth cotton, he debated waking her, but first tried to convince himself it was just trace echoes of the past, fear he’d felt before and still hadn’t, couldn’t, after all this time, contrive to forget. So he lay quietly and listened, willing his heartbeat to slow, measuring his breathing, listening until the quiet turned itself inside out and he was all but certain that, yes, somebody was in the apartment with them.

  And his pulse started pounding all over again.

  He reached down and groped under the bed for the aluminum softball bat he kept there, just in case.

  Shadow among shadows, he slid from his bed and drifted, bat gripped two-handed, into the hallway. He heard the rustle of bougainvillea, felt a breeze on his neck. He smelled lantana out in the courtyard, wet, sickly-sweet. And mildew, from the entry stairwell, where the plaster was ruined by January’s rains.

  The front door to the apartment was open, halfway, light from the outside corridor spilling in.

  He froze. Brought the bat to half-mast and re-gripped it, and re-gripped it, wondering what he’d do if the intruder stepped out of the darkness now. More than anything, Jay wanted to get back in the bed, back under the covers, the way he would when he was eight and afraid of the darkness, convinced that if any part of him was exposed to the night whatever was lurking in it would take him. Safe, under the covers, until the rescue of daylight, and his mom waking him, smiling, everything good.

  He peered back down the hallway, where he could see the sheer curtains rippling because the French doors to the tiny balcony were open.

  Doors that had been closed when they fell asleep.

  He waited, listened for the intruder.

  Nothing.

  The common corridor was empty when he walked out of his apartment to the stairwell banister and looked down.

  Two floors below: a hand on the railing: someone descending: the faintest complaint from the loose riser near the bottom.

  Then gone.

  • • •

  You call the cops?”

  “And tell them what? Somebody took a shortcut through my place?”

  “Well . . . yeah.”

  “I didn’t, no. Call them.”

  Manchurian Global, lunchtime, Vaughn’s lab. Not quite The Island of Dr. Moreau, but pretty freaky. The chemical smells. The shivery racket of caged rodents, hard drives, refrigerators, and floor fans.

  “Maybe you imagined it.”

  “No.”

  Jay didn’t tell Stacy what he thought had happened until morning. He just closed all the doors and locked them and sat for a while in the darkened living room, thinking about his brother, Carl, and what he might be doing if he were still alive. Then he booted up Call of Duty and played with the sound turned off, abandoning strategy for maximum firepower and discovering what he already knew: it doesn’t work. Toward dawn, Jay slipped back into bed and did the trick he’d learned about forgetting, turning reality into a dream, because dreams could be dismissed and forgotten, lost in the veiled awakening to a new day.

  “Freaked me out, I’ll tell you that.”

  He watched a white mouse smear through a luminous white world of white dead ends and white disappointment; it stopped, sniffing, determined, the droll pink eyes staring, spooked. Distorted and washed out and his nose a fleshy insult, Vaughn’s green eyes peered intently back at the mouse through Plexiglas etched by countless tiny laboratory mouse scratches, watching the helter-skelter progress of today’s furry volunteer.

  Or victim, Jay thought.

  “Nothing missing?”

  “No.”

 
; “What’d Stacy say?”

  “She thinks I imagined it.”

  Vaughn let his silence make its point.

  “She’s wrong, Vaughn.”

  The mouse scampered bumbly down the white pathways, making one sharp right turn after another, sure of itself now, remembering the way, hurrying toward the expectation of a reward and oblivious to the possibility of a punishment—like us, Jay thought. A white plastic dreamscape with the voice of God moving behind it, monitoring his geometric paradise, if God was a lanky post-doc named Vaughn: “Maybe it was that guy.”

  Jay frowned. “What guy?”

  “Stacy’s, you know—her old boyfriend. The boxer.”

  The boxer. “Juan Pablo?” No. Jay said, “He moved to Houston. And he wasn’t a boxer—or a cage fighter or whatever—that was just you telling stories that one night, after a couple of French 75s.”

  Vaughn’s face rose and loomed over the Milky White Maze, with proto-geek safety glasses and a tentative, beardlike facial growth, his hair gelled up all porcupine, finger-in-socket, over the chalky labyrinthian passageways, a brooding Magog. “We’re so vulnerable when we’re asleep,” Vaughn mused darkly.

  Jay shrugged. “Asleep, awake, it’s not that different.”

  “Oh.” Vaughn waited for Jay to expand on this observation, then looked disappointed when he understood that Jay wouldn’t.

  The mouse was momentarily still. Listening to them.

  “What do you know about experimental neurosis, Jaybird?”

  “A little,” Jay lied. “Remind me.”

  “Mice,” Vaughn explained, “whose genetic makeup is more similar to that of human beings than most of us care to admit, are submitted to a maze at the end of which are two doors, one with a circle that rewards them with food, and one with an ellipse that punishes them with an electric shock.”

  “Sounds fairly unremarkable, so far. Junior-high science fair stuff from, I dunno, 1954?”

  “Don’t snark.” Vaughn’s gaze was hard on his test mouse as it scampered toward what Jay guessed would be a dreamy white failure, since that was usually the experimental goal. “Over time,” Vaughn continued, “we change out the ellipse on the shock door, slowly replacing it with a less and less ovoid shape. Or, in other words, the symbol becoming more and more similar to the one on the safe door, more and more circular with each successive iteration.”